All Good People Here

Flowers is the host and executive producer of numerous podcasts (The Deck, Supernatural, and Crime Junkie) for the Audiochuck Podcast Network. In her debut novel, All Good People Here, Flowers creates a narrative that draws both from her interest in true crime and her experience of growing up in small-town Indiana. Many of the crimes Flowers and her co-host, Brit Prawat, cover on the podcast Crime Junkie are based in Indiana. Wakarusa, Indiana, a real town, is also the setting of the book. Flowers thanks Prawat in the acknowledgments section of the book: “We also could not have made this book feel so authentic without those who contributed their expertise on subject matter: My best friend, Brit Prawat, who grew up in Wakarusa and helped me make the town feel real” (311). Flowers herself grew up in nearby South Bend, Indiana, another prominent location within the text.

Flowers’s experience growing up in Indiana and its surrounding areas contributes to her understanding of midwestern culture: the benefits and downsides of small-town life. The title of the text, All Good People Here, evokes the small-town platitudes often associated with Midwest American states: everyone knowing everyone in town, a natural mistrust of strangers, and an insatiable desire for neighborhood gossip, paired with the insistence that the townspeople are all “churchgoing, law-abiding, capital-G Godfearing people” (3). The text serves as an indictment of Wakarusa’s propensity for valuing entertaining rumors over facts: “The Wakarusa gossip chain would flap their jaws, chewing the tidbit over so thoroughly that by the time they’d finally spat it out again, the Truth was misshapen and unrecognizable, warped into the Story” (3). Growing up in Indiana, Flowers understands the ramifications of a community so steeped in gossip that someone would go to extreme lengths to avoid its scrutiny. Flowers writes Krissy as this character, a grieving mother who stages a false crime scene in her home to protect her son, whom she mistakenly believes murdered her daughter. In her attempt to protect her son from the town’s judgment, Krissy unknowingly obfuscates the real crime: that her husband killed her daughter. Krissy’s attempts to shield her family from small-town scrutiny result in a 25-year cold case and cost Krissy her life.

Flowers’s involvement in true crime also contributes to the subject matter of the text. Flowers advocates for victims through her podcasts and her nonprofit, Season of Justice. The nonprofit works to solve crimes by funding grants to allow DNA testing for cold cases. Flowers’s real-life interest in bringing justice to those killed and affected by true crime is evident within the narrative of All Good People Here. Flowers’s protagonist, Margot, is a reporter whose investment in truth and justice leads to her bringing serial killer Elliott Wallace to account. Margot’s pursuit of justice mirrors Flowers’s own:

Margot thought of […] all the girls across the world who’d been trapped alone in rooms with men just like him […] men who, in one way or another, threw girls away. To so many, those girls were nameless and faceless, numbers on a sad and growing list (298).

In producing her podcasts and authoring her novel, Flowers hopes to bring about awareness of underreported cases so that the “sad and growing list” not only shortens, but one day ceases to exist.